Great Competitor Quotes

REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS Before you were born, And were still too tiny for The human eye to see, You won the race for life From among 250 million competitors. And yet, How fast you have forgotten Your strength, When your very existence Is proof of your greatness. You were born a winner, A warrior, One who defied the odds By surviving the most gruesome Battle of them all. And now that you are a giant, Why do you even doubt victory Against smaller numbers, And wider margins? The only walls that exist, Are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, Exist only because you have forgotten What you have already Achieved. Poetry by Suzy Kassem

If you want to succeed and leave your competitors behind, you need great plans and even greater strategies.

REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS Before you were born, And were still too tiny for The human eye to see, You won the race for life From among 250 million competitors. And yet, How fast you have forgotten Your strength, When your very existence Is proof of your greatness. You were born a winner, A warrior, One who defied the odds By surviving the most gruesome Battle of them all. And now that you are a giant, Why do you even doubt victory Against smaller numbers, And wider margins? The only walls that exist, Are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, Exist only because you have forgotten What you have already Achieved.

In order to become a success, a business doesn't just have to do well, it has to to better than its competitors. Being number one isn't just about bragging rights. Often it means the difference between prospering and merely hanging on.

Before you were born, and were still too tiny for the human eye to see, you won the race for life from among 250 million competitors. And yet, how fast you have forgotten your strength, when your very existence is proof of your greatness.

You feel ownership over your creation, your invention, and your ideas. But if you don’t legally claim them, you’re donating them to the public—or to competitors. Say you’ve come up with a solution to a problem. Protecting that potentially valuable IP creates a limited monopoly to keep people out. It’s like zone defense in basketball. IP rights help you own your zone—your competitive space where no one else can score. If the best offense is a great defense, then no offense is the worst.

The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.

Talent silences your competition; genius deafens them.

A business plan is like a war plan, when you competitors know about it, it's no longer of any use

Big Mountains are a completely different world. You can not conquer them, only rise to their height for a short time; & for that they demand a great deal. The struggle is not with the enemy, or a competitor like in sports, but with yourself, with the feelings of weakness & inadequacy. That struggle appeals to me. It is why I became a mountaineer.

The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors… . The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks and by the justification of perfect personal candor… . How beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

Markets mean patrons, buyers, consumers. There is under capitalism one way to wealth: to serve the consumers better and cheaper than other people do. But in the shop and factory, the owner—or in the corporations, the representative of the shareholders, the president—is the boss. The mastership is merely apparent and conditional. He is subject to the supremacy of the consumer. The consumer is king—the real boss—and the manufacturer is done for if he does not outstrip his competitors in best serving the consumers. It was this great economic transformation that changed the face of the world.

Skills have been de-emphasised in art, as elsewhere in the culture. The atomistic nature of our individuality is made clear in Warhol’s tongue-in-cheek ambition for us each to be ‘famous for fifteen minutes’. We’ve all got to be as creative as one another: to accept that some people will always be exceptional is uncomfortable for us. Instead of seeing great art as an indication of what humanity can achieve, it comes to be seen as an expression of what another being, a potential competitor, has achieved.

How wonderful science is nowadays,” said Miss Marple. “Doctors can do so much, can’t they?” “We all have one great competitor,” said Dr. Graham. “Nature, you know. And some of the good old-fashioned home remedies come back from time to time.

STAGE 1—shared by most street gangs and characterized by despair, hostility, and the collective belief that “life sucks.” STAGE 2—filled primarily with apathetic people who perceive themselves as victims and who are passively antagonistic, with the mind-set that “my life sucks.” Think The Office on TV or the Dilbert comic strip. STAGE 3—focused primarily on individual achievement and driven by the motto “I’m great (and you’re not).” According to the authors, people in organizations at this stage “have to win, and for them winning is personal. They’ll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. The mood that results is a collection of ‘lone warriors.’” STAGE 4—dedicated to tribal pride and the overriding conviction that “we’re great (and they’re not).” This kind of team requires a strong adversary, and the bigger the foe, the more powerful the tribe. STAGE 5—a rare stage characterized by a sense of innocent wonder and the strong belief that “life is great.” (See Bulls, Chicago, 1995–98.)

Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, who’d once said, “When you see your competitor drowning, grab a fire hose and put it in his mouth.

Stage Five’s T-shirt would read “life is great,” and they haven’t been doing illicit substances. Their language revolves around infinite potential and how the group is going to make history—not to beat a competitor, but because doing so will make a global impact. This group’s mood is “innocent wonderment,” with people in competition with what’s possible, not with another tribe.

You’ve probably heard about “first mover advantage”: if you’re the first entrant into a market, you can capture significant market share while competitors scramble to get started. But moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision. In this one particular at least, business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.

You might be thinking, “But what if someone steals my idea?” Trust me: most of us don’t have the spare time to start a company with your great idea, and even if we did, it’s going to be up to you to outexecute your competitors. You’re

Our industries, our trade, and our way of life generally have been based first on the exploitation of the earth's surface and then on the oppression of one another--on banditry pure and simple. The inevitable result is now upon us. The unsuccessful bandits are trying to despoil their more successful competitors. The world is divided into two hostile camps: at the root of this vast conflict lies the evil of spoliation which has destroyed the moral integrity of our generation. While this contest marches to its inevitable conclusion, it will not be amiss to draw attention to a forgotten factor which may perhaps help to restore peace and harmony to a tortured world. We must in our future planning pay great attention to food--the product of sun, soil, plant, and livestock--in other words, to farming and gardening.

Were an election for President to be held tomorrow, Old Abe would, without the special aid of any of his friends, walk over the course, without a competitor to dispute with him the great prize which his masterly ability, no less than his undoubted patriotism and unimpeachable honesty, have won.

the course of time, all of Apple’s competitors lost their WHY. Now all those companies define themselves by WHAT they do: we make computers. They turned from companies with a cause into companies that sold products. And when that happens, price, quality, service and features become the primary currency to motivate a purchase decision. At that point a company and its products have ostensibly become commodities. As any company forced to compete on price, quality, service or features alone can attest, it is very hard to differentiate for any period of time or build loyalty on those factors alone.

According to Massimo Maffei from the University of Turin, plants-and that includes trees-are perfectly capable of distinguishing their own roots from the roots of other species and even from the roots of related individuals. But why are trees such social beings? Why do they share food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors? The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old. To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, which would make it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The heat of summer would reach teh forest floor and dry it out. Every tree would suffer.

At a nearby table, two men in suits were discussing the gymnastics final in booming voices. “She never would have won if the Russians hadn’t boycotted,” the man insisted. “It’s not a victory if the best players aren’t there.” Sam asked his mother whether she thought the man with the loud voice was right. “Hmm.” Anna sipped her iced tea and then she rested her chin in her hands, which Sam had learned to recognize as her philosophizing gesture. Anna was a great talker, and it was one of the most profound pleasures of young Sam’s life to discuss the world and its mysteries with his mother. No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did. “Even if what he says is true, I think it’s still a victory,” she said. “Because she won on this day, with this particular set of people. We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.

Thus, by 1888 it had become evident that a national cooperative movement could not succeed in America, at least not in the absence of sustained, massive and violent attack on the wage-system, far more massive and well-organized than the Knights’ movement had been. As Henry Sharpe said, what they were doing was not realistic. Small workshops with little capital and obsolete machinery in an age of rapid industrialization; insufficient institution-building to give financial and material support to co-ops; enslavement to the market at a time when competitors would stop at nothing to suppress working-class moves toward independence. Especially with the weak leadership of Terence Powderly and the mass desertion of former Knights after 1886, as they lost strike after strike, the great dream of building a national cooperative economy was effectively over.

It is true that from time to time Jews suffered from the fury of an exploited peasantry or their competitors. But from time to time the aristocracy suffered the same fate. Thousands of French aristocrats were slaughtered during peasant uprisings or at the Great Terror of 1793. Many Russian aristocrats were killed or expelled during the October Revolution of 1917. Many of them were innocent, for class warfare can be as cruel as any war.

The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way. The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money. The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale. George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.

During the Great Forgetting, it came to be understood among the people of our culture that life in “the wild” was governed by a single, cruel law known as the Law of the Jungle, or kill or be killed. In recent decades, by the process of looking (instead of merely assuming), ethologists have discovered this “kill or be killed” law is a fiction. In fact, a system of laws-universally observed- preserves the tranquility of the jungle, protects species and even individuals and promotes the well being of the community as a whole. The system has been called, the peacekeeping law, the law of limited competition, and animal ethics. Briefly, the law of limited competition is this: You may compete to the fullest extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors, or destroy their food source, or deny them access to food. In other words, you can compete but you may not wage war on your competitors.

my pleasure in having Albertine living with me now was much less a positive pleasure than satisfaction at having removed from the world, where everyone could enjoy her in turn, the blossoming young girl who, even if she caused no great joy to me, at least could not offer it to anyone else. Ambition, glory could never have meant anything to me. Still less was I capable of experiencing hatred. All the same, carnal love for me was above all the joy of triumphing over so many competitors. I cannot repeat it too often, more than anything else it was relief from pain.

In the mid-1980s, Congress authorized the creation of the US Sentencing Commission to examine prison terms and codify norms to correct the arbitrary punishments meted out by unaccountable judges. First, in 1989 the commission’s guidelines for individuals went into effect, establishing a point system for how many years of prison a convicted criminal might get, based on the seriousness of the misconduct and a person’s criminal history. In 1991, amid public and congressional outrage that sentences for white-collar criminals were too light and fines and sanctions for corporations too lenient, the Sentencing Commission expanded the concept to cover organizations. It formalized the Sporkin-era regime of offering leniency in exchange for cooperation and reform. The new rules delineated factors that could earn a culprit mercy. In levying a fine, the court should consider, the sentencing guidelines said, “any collateral consequences of conviction.” 1 “Collateral consequences” was, and remains, an ill-defined concept. How worried should the government be if a punishment causes a company to go out of business? Should regulators worry about the cashiering of innocent employees? What about customers, suppliers, or competitors? Should they fret about financial crises? From this rather innocuous mention, the little notion of collateral consequences would blossom into the great strangling vine that came to be known after the financial crisis of 2008 by its shorthand: “too big to jail.” Prosecutors and regulators were crippled by the idea that the government could not criminally sanction some companies—particularly giant banks—for fear that they would collapse, causing serious problems for financial markets or the economy.

I even reached a point of detachment where I was able to see clearly that he was a top operator of a complex vehicle who had some great skills and some fundamental problems. The trick to working well with him was to understand that the problems were his, not mine, and they all seemed to stem from his insecurity. He was unable to view his colleagues as anything other than competitors out to destroy him, who therefore needed to be squashed like bugs. Once, flying up to Washington in a NASA jet, I stopped to refuel and a military guy I’d never met before noticed the plane and said, “Hey, do you know ____? What an asshole!

Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity. Here, in my own words, is what a modern version of Smithism claims. First, the spontaneous and voluntary exchange of goods and services leads to a division of labour in which people specialise in what they are good at doing. Second, this in turn leads to gains from trade for each party to a transaction, because everybody is doing what he is most productive at and has the chance to learn, practise and even mechanise his chosen task. Individuals can thus use and improve their own tacit and local knowledge in a way that no expert or ruler could. Third, gains from trade encourage more specialisation, which encourages more trade, in a virtuous circle. The greater the specialisation among producers, the greater is the diversification of consumption: in moving away from self-sufficiency people get to produce fewer things, but to consume more. Fourth, specialisation inevitably incentivises innovation, which is also a collaborative process driven by the exchange and combination of ideas. Indeed, most innovation comes about through the recombination of existing ideas for how to make or organise things. The more people trade and the more they divide labour, the more they are working for each other. The more they work for each other, the higher their living standards. The consequence of the division of labour is an immense web of cooperation among strangers: it turns potential enemies into honorary friends. A woollen coat, worn by a day labourer, was (said Smith) ‘the produce of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser . . .’ In parting with money to buy a coat, the labourer was not reducing his wealth. Gains from trade are mutual; if they were not, people would not voluntarily engage in trade. The more open and free the market, the less opportunity there is for exploitation and predation, because the easier it is for consumers to boycott the predators and for competitors to whittle away their excess profits. In its ideal form, therefore, the free market is a device for creating networks of collaboration among people to raise each other’s living standards, a device for coordinating production and a device for communicating information about needs through the price mechanism. Also a device for encouraging innovation. It is the very opposite of the rampant and selfish individualism that so many churchmen and others seem to think it is. The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.

One article on reproductive strategies was titled "Sneaky Fuckers." Kya laughed. As is well known, the article began, in nature, usually the males with the most prominent secondary sexual characteristics, such as the biggest antlers, deepest voices, broadest chests, and superior knowledge secure the best territories because they have fended off weaker males. The females choose to mate with these imposing alphas and are thereby inseminated with the best DNA around, which is passed on to the female's offspring- one of the most powerful phenomena in the adaptation and continuance of life. Plus, the females get the best territory for their young. However, some stunted males, not strong, adorned, or smart enough to hold good territories, possess bags of tricks to fool the females. They parade their smaller forms around in pumped-up postures or shout frequently- even if in shrill voices. By relying on pretense and false signals, they manage to grab a copulation here or there. Pint-sized male bullfrogs, the author wrote, hunker down in the grass and hide near an alpha male who is croaking with great gusto to call in mates. When several females are attracted to his strong vocals at the same time, and the alpha is busy copulating with one, the weaker male leaps in and mates one of the others. The imposter males were referred to as "sneaky fuckers." Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. "Unworthy boys make a lot of noise," Ma had said. She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone. Another article delved into the wild rivalries between sperm. Across most life-forms, males compete to inseminate females. Male lions occasionally fight to the death; rival bull elephants lock tusks and demolish the ground beneath their feet as they tear at each other's flesh. Though very ritualized, the conflicts can still end in mutilations. To avoid such injuries, inseminators of some species compete in less violent, more creative methods. Insects, the most imaginative. The penis of the male damselfly is equipped with a small scoop, which removes sperm ejected by a previous opponent before he supplies his own. Kya dropped the journal on her lap, her mind drifting with the clouds. Some female insects eat their mates, overstressed mammal mothers abandon their young, many males design risky or shifty ways to outsperm their competitors. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick and the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. Surely for humans there was more.

What if the interests of the self were expanded to the point of approximating a God’s eye view of humanity? Seeing all things under the aspect of eternity would make one objective toward oneself, accepting failure as on a par with success in the stupendous human drama of yes and no, positive and negative, push and pull. Personal failure would be as small a cause for concerns as playing a loser in a summer theater performance. How could one feel disappointed in one’s own defeat if one experienced the victor’s joy as also one’s own; if one’s competitor’s success was enjoyed vicariously? Instead of crying impossible, we should perhaps content ourselves with noting how different this would feel from life as it is usually lived, for reports of the greatest spiritual geniuses suggest they rose to something like this perspective

As it turned out, Sharpe was right. Cooperation succumbed to market forces, but even more to the war waged on it by the business classes. By 1887 the latter were determined to destroy the Knights, with their incessant boycotts, their strikes (sometimes involving hundreds of thousands), their revolutionary agitation, and their labor parties organized across the country. In the two years after the infamous Haymarket bombing in Chicago and the Great Upheaval of 1886, in which 200,000 trade unionists across the country went on a four-day-long strike for the eight-hour day but in most cases failed—partly because Terence Powderly, the leader of the Knights, who had always disliked strikes, refused to endorse the action and encouraged the Knights not to participate—capitalist repression swept the nation. Joseph Rayback summarizes: The first of the Knights’ ventures to feel the full effect of the post-Haymarket reaction were their cooperative enterprises. In part the very nature of such enterprises worked against them. The successful ventures became joint-stock corporations, the wage-earning shareholders and managers hiring labor like any other industrial unit. In part the cooperatives were destroyed by inefficient managers, squabbles among shareholders, lack of capital, and injudicious borrowing of money at high rates of interest. Just as important was the attitude of competitors. Railroads delayed the building of tracks, refused to furnish cars, or refused to haul them. Manufacturers of machinery and producers of raw materials, pressed by private business, refused to sell their products to the cooperative workshops and paralyzed operations. By 1888 none of the Order’s cooperatives were in existence.170

No great nation is ever conquered until it has destroyed itself. Deforestation and the abuse of the soil, the depletion of precious metals, the migration of trade routes, the disturbance of economic life by political disorder, the corruption of democracy and the degeneration of dynasties, the decay of morals and patriotism, the decline or deterioration of the population, the replacement of citizen armies by mercenary troops, the human and physical wastage of fratricidal war, the guillotining of ability by murderous revolutions and counterrevolutions—all these had exhausted the resources of Hellas at the very time when the little state on the Tiber, ruled by a ruthless and farseeing aristocracy, was training hardy legions of landowners, conquering its neighbors and competitors, capturing the food and minerals of the western Mediterranean, and advancing year by year upon the Greek settlements in Italy.

What then did those immortals see, the writers who aimed at all which is greatest and scorned the accuracy which lies in every detail? They saw many other things and they also saw this, that Nature determined man to be no low or ignoble animal; but introducing us into life and this entire universe as into some vast assemblage, to be spectators, in a sort, of her entirety, and most ardent competitors, did then implant in our souls an invincible and eternal love of that which is great and, by our own standard, more devine. Therefore it is, that for the speculation and thought which are within the scope of human endeavour not all the universe together is sufficient, our conceptions often pass beyond the bounds which limit it; and if a man were to look upon life all around, and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, he will at once know for what ends we have been born.

per hour. Handbrake knew that he could keep up with the best of them. Ambassadors might look old-fashioned and slow, but the latest models had Japanese engines. But he soon learned to keep it under seventy. Time and again, as his competitors raced up behind him and made their impatience known by the use of their horns and flashing high beams, he grudgingly gave way, pulling into the slow lane among the trucks, tractors and bullock carts. Soon, the lush mustard and sugarcane fields of Haryana gave way to the scrub and desert of Rajasthan. Four hours later, they reached the rocky hills surrounding the Pink City, passing in the shadow of the Amber Fort with its soaring ramparts and towering gatehouse. The road led past the Jal Mahal palace, beached on a sandy lake bed, into Jaipur’s ancient quarter. It was almost noon and the bazaars along the city’s crenellated walls were stirring into life. Beneath faded, dusty awnings, cobblers crouched, sewing sequins and gold thread onto leather slippers with curled-up toes. Spice merchants sat surrounded by heaps of lal mirch, haldi and ground jeera, their colours as clean and sharp as new watercolor paints. Sweets sellers lit the gas under blackened woks of oil and prepared sticky jalebis. Lassi vendors chipped away at great blocks of ice delivered by camel cart. In front of a few of the shops, small boys, who by law should have been at school, swept the pavements, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust. One dragged a doormat into the road where the wheels of passing vehicles ran over it, doing the job of carpet beaters. Handbrake honked his way through the light traffic as they neared the Ajmeri Gate, watching the faces that passed by his window: skinny bicycle rickshaw drivers, straining against the weight of fat aunties; wild-eyed Rajasthani men with long handlebar moustaches and sun-baked faces almost as bright as their turbans; sinewy peasant women wearing gold nose rings and red glass bangles on their arms; a couple of pink-faced goras straining under their backpacks; a naked sadhu, his body half covered in ash like a caveman. Handbrake turned into the old British Civil Lines, where the roads were wide and straight and the houses and gardens were set well apart. Ajay Kasliwal’s residence was number

has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that. Every now and then a wise colleague would pull Jobs aside to try to get him to settle down. Lee Clow was a master. “Steve, can I talk to you?” he would quietly say when Jobs had belittled someone publicly. He would go into Jobs’s office and explain how hard everyone was working. “When you humiliate them, it’s more debilitating than stimulating,” he said in one such session. Jobs would apologize and say he understood. But then he would lapse again. “It’s simply who I am,” he would say. One thing that did mellow was his attitude toward Bill Gates. Microsoft had kept its end of the bargain it made in 1997, when it agreed to continue developing great software for the Macintosh. Also, it was becoming less relevant as a competitor, having failed thus far to replicate Apple’s digital hub strategy. Gates and Jobs had very different approaches to products and innovation, but their rivalry had produced in each a surprising self-awareness.

If the global pie stayed the same size, there was no margin for credit. Credit is the difference between today’s pie and tomorrow’s pie. If the pie stays the same, why extend credit? It would be an unacceptable risk unless you believed that the baker or king asking for your money might be able to steal a slice from a competitor. So it was hard to get a loan in the premodern world, and when you got one it was usually small, short-term, and subject to high interest rates. Upstart entrepreneurs thus found it difficult to open new bakeries and great kings who wanted to build palaces or wage wars had no choice but to raise the necessary funds through high taxes and tariffs. That was fine for kings (as long as their subjects remained docile), but a scullery maid who had a great idea for a bakery and wanted to move up in the world generally could only dream of wealth while scrubbing down the royal kitchen’s floors. The Magic Circle of the Modern Economy It was lose-lose. Because credit was limited, people had trouble financing new businesses. Because there were few new businesses, the economy did not grow. Because it did not grow, people assumed it never would, and those who had capital were wary of extending credit. The expectation of stagnation fulfilled itself.

Nietzsche's response to this situation is not to seek narcotics in a return to the past or a flight to the supersensible, but instead to assert, and in a deeper form to accept, even to accelerate, the approach of nihilism on a European, if not global, scale. A rejuvenation of the human spirit is possible only through a complete destruction of the decadent present. Like very few before him, Nietzsche sees the necessary link between radical creativity, on the one hand, and war, courage, and brutality, on the other. The great creators abominate everything that interferes with the full expression of their will to power; they are not egalitarians, democrats, or refined and tolerant appreciators of the poems of their competitors. The bestiality of the blonde beast may be understood not simply as an expression of the need to destroy in order to create but as a consequence of Nietzsche's fundamental identification of Being and history History is the dissolution of Being into chaos, as reorganized by the shifting perspectives of man, the highest incarnation of the will to power. As we have seen, a reliance upon courage led Nietzsche to invoke the unleashing of the blonde beasts and wars of universal destruction as the negative prelude to the advent of positive nihilism.

In the absence of expert [senior military] advice, we have seen each successive administration fail in the business of strategy - yielding a United States twice as rich as the Soviet Union but much less strong. Only the manner of the failure has changed. In the 1960s, under Robert S. McNamara, we witnessed the wholesale substitution of civilian mathematical analysis for military expertise. The new breed of the "systems analysts" introduced new standards of intellectual discipline and greatly improved bookkeeping methods, but also a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happens to be nonmeasurable. Because morale is nonmeasurable it was ignored, in large and small ways, with disastrous effects. We have seen how the pursuit of business-type efficiency in the placement of each soldier destroys the cohesion that makes fighting units effective; we may recall how the Pueblo was left virtually disarmed when it encountered the North Koreans (strong armament was judged as not "cost effective" for ships of that kind). Because tactics, the operational art of war, and strategy itself are not reducible to precise numbers, money was allocated to forces and single weapons according to "firepower" scores, computer simulations, and mathematical studies - all of which maximize efficiency - but often at the expense of combat effectiveness. An even greater defect of the McNamara approach to military decisions was its businesslike "linear" logic, which is right for commerce or engineering but almost always fails in the realm of strategy. Because its essence is the clash of antagonistic and outmaneuvering wills, strategy usually proceeds by paradox rather than conventional "linear" logic. That much is clear even from the most shopworn of Latin tags: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), whose business equivalent would be orders of "if you want sales, add to your purchasing staff," or some other, equally absurd advice. Where paradox rules, straightforward linear logic is self-defeating, sometimes quite literally. Let a general choose the best path for his advance, the shortest and best-roaded, and it then becomes the worst path of all paths, because the enemy will await him there in greatest strength... Linear logic is all very well in commerce and engineering, where there is lively opposition, to be sure, but no open-ended scope for maneuver; a competitor beaten in the marketplace will not bomb our factory instead, and the river duly bridged will not deliberately carve out a new course. But such reactions are merely normal in strategy. Military men are not trained in paradoxical thinking, but they do no have to be. Unlike the business-school expert, who searches for optimal solutions in the abstract and then presents them will all the authority of charts and computer printouts, even the most ordinary military mind can recall the existence of a maneuvering antagonists now and then, and will therefore seek robust solutions rather than "best" solutions - those, in other words, which are not optimal but can remain adequate even when the enemy reacts to outmaneuver the first approach.

In the present time, Information Technology has emerged as one of the most promising Industries across the globe. Globally for the reduction of cost, time and efforts involved in the production and supply of the goods and services has made whole business world to adopt the technological support. And due to this reason only Software development have emerged as a important means of growth of IT Industry in India. Software Development Companies in India Have played a crucial role in rapid development of Software industry in India. These Companies Constantly improve and enhance the world of computers and technology. With the help of Software development all the complicated machines whether its computers, laptops, mobile phones or navigation devices all these machines are the way they are today performing various tasks successfully. As Software Development is having a essential role in many industries, so organizations have realized their importance for improving themselves in various aspects of management. Software Development have increased the productivity of the businesses by reducing the human efforts and errors. This increased demand in the Software Development have also given rise to high demand of Software Development Companies everywhere. Even there is a huge demand of best Software Company in Lucknow as Lucknow being capital of U.P have become a growing market for various industries and now almost every offline brand has setup into online businesses of their products and services. As the number of internet users are increasing day by day so are the businesses entering into the online so that they could influence customers online. Besides Software Development many other web solutions like web hosting, web development and website designing services have great demand in the market also therefore, Software Companies have started offering all these services along with software development. Software Industry is flooded with various software companies which are also Website Development Company in Lucknow offering various web based services but it is required by you to choose wisely which company to choose to help your business sustain successfully in long run and stay ahead of its competitors in the market. The company is choosen such that which provide good quality software’s in affordable price.

The Delusion of Lasting Success promises that building an enduring company is not only achievable but a worthwhile objective. Yet companies that have outperformed the market for long periods of time are not just rare, they are statistical artifacts that are observable only in retrospect. Companies that achieved lasting success may be best understood as having strung together many short-term successes. Pursuing a dream of enduring greatness may divert attention from the pressing need to win immediate battles. The Delusion of Absolute Performance diverts our attention from the fact that success and failure always take place in a competitive environment. It may be comforting to believe that our success is entirely up to us, but as the example of Kmart demonstrated, a company can improve in absolute terms and still fall further behind in relative terms. Success in business means doing things better than rivals, not just doing things well. Believing that performance is absolute can cause us to take our eye off rivals and to avoid decisions that, while risky, may be essential for survival given the particular context of our industry and its competitive dynamics. The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick lets us confuse causes and effects, actions and outcomes. We may look at a handful of extraordinarily successful companies and imagine that doing what they did can lead to success — when it might in fact lead mainly to higher volatility and a lower overall chance of success. Unless we start with the full population of companies and examine what they all did — and how they all fared — we have an incomplete and indeed biased set of information. The Delusion of Organizational Physics implies that the business world offers predictable results, that it conforms to precise laws. It fuels a belief that a given set of actions can work in all settings and ignores the need to adapt to different conditions: intensity of competition, rate of growth, size of competitors, market concentration, regulation, global dispersion of activities, and much more. Claiming that one approach can work everywhere, at all times, for all companies, has a simplistic appeal but doesn’t do justice to the complexities of business. These points, taken together, expose the principal fiction at the heart of so many business books — that a company can choose to be great, that following a few key steps will predictably lead to greatness, that its success is entirely of its own making and not dependent on factors outside its control.

In late fall, I had a phone sessions with my Oregon therapist. For some reason, we started talking about happiness. “Chris achieved happiness so easily,” I said to him. “And I don’t.” The counselor interrupted me. “Do you know how he did?” I started to answer that I didn’t. But then I realized that Chris had set out to do many things, and he’d achieved them. He’d wanted to be a rodeo competitor, work as a cowboy, join the SEALs. He’d done all of those. What’s more, he excelled at them. Those achievements made him happy, or at least confident enough that he could be happy. As we talked, the counselor noted that I, too, had my own achievements. But I told him--as he already knew--that I wanted to do so many more things. And I always do. Was that a reason not to be happy? The counselor pointed out that I tend to focus on what I haven’t done, rather than what I’ve achieved. My thinking runs; If I do A, then B, then C, then I’ll be happy. But when I achieve A, rather than saying “Yay!” I say, “I haven’t done B and C, so I can’t be happy.” Why focus on what I haven’t done? Why not celebrate those things I have done, even as I look forward to doing other things on my list? Those achievements are accomplishments--I should feel good about them, confident I can do more. And happy. Or at least happier. Another lesson. There are other components to happiness beyond achievement. “Smaller” things, like carving out time for workouts as well as the kids, are actually big things when they are added up. Yet I often feel those things are distractions from what I really want to achieve. Blockers, rather than stepping-stones. Obviously, the wrong way to think about them. On paper, it doesn’t seem like a very profound realization. But put into practice, it means that I--we, all of us--have to keep things in the larger perspective. If you want to achieve a lot, then the reality is that you are always going to have something else you want to do. Keep trying to achieve, but don’t beat yourself up for not getting everything done. The “smaller” things are just as essential to happiness. So: the key to my happiness is appreciating what I have and what I’ve done, and realizing that I’ll always have something else to do. Profound? No, but empowering. I might never have realized it had I not been grieving so deeply. I would have felt silly, really, talking about achieving happiness when Chris was alive. Why wouldn’t I be happy with a great husband and wonderful children? I was happy. But not at the deepest level. I’m not there yet, obviously. But it is possible now. And yet I still wonder: How can I possibly be happy with Chris gone?

But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th

MT: Mimetic desire can only produce evil? RG: No, it can become bad if it stirs up rivalries but it isn't bad in itself, in fact it's very good, and, fortunately, people can no more give it up than they can give up food or sleep. It is to imitation that we owe not only our traditions, without which we would be helpless, but also, paradoxically, all the innovations about which so much is made today. Modern technology and science show this admirably. Study the history of the world economy and you'll see that since the nineteenth century all the countries that, at a given moment, seemed destined never to play anything but a subordinate role, for lack of “creativity,” because of their imitative or, as Montaigne would have said, their “apish” nature, always turned out later on to be more creative than their models. It began with Germany, which, in the nineteenth century, was thought to be at most capable of imitating the English, and this at the precise moment it surpassed them. It continued with the Americans in whom, for a long time, the Europeans saw mediocre gadget-makers who weren't theoretical or cerebral enough to take on a world leadership role. And it happened once more with the Japanese who, after World War II, were still seen as pathetic imitators of Western superiority. It's starting up again, it seems, with Korea, and soon, perhaps, it'll be the Chinese. All of these consecutive mistakes about the creative potential of imitation cannot be due to chance. To make an effective imitator, you have to openly admire the model you're imitating, you have to acknowledge your imitation. You have to explicitly recognize the superiority of those who succeed better than you and set about learning from them. If a businessman sees his competitor making money while he's losing money, he doesn't have time to reinvent his whole production process. He imitates his more fortunate rivals. In business, imitation remains possible today because mimetic vanity is less involved than in the arts, in literature, and in philosophy. In the most spiritual domains, the modern world rejects imitation in favor of originality at all costs. You should never say what others are saying, never paint what others are painting, never think what others are thinking, and so on. Since this is absolutely impossible, there soon emerges a negative imitation that sterilizes everything. Mimetic rivalry cannot flare up without becoming destructive in a great many ways. We can see it today in the so-called soft sciences (which fully deserve the name). More and more often they're obliged to turn their coats inside out and, with great fanfare, announce some new “epistemological rupture” that is supposed to revolutionize the field from top to bottom. This rage for originality has produced a few rare masterpieces and quite a few rather bizarre things in the style of Jacques Lacan's Écrits. Just a few years ago the mimetic escalation had become so insane that it drove everyone to make himself more incomprehensible than his peers. In American universities the imitation of those models has since produced some pretty comical results. But today that lemon has been squeezed completely dry. The principle of originality at all costs leads to paralysis. The more we celebrate “creative and enriching” innovations, the fewer of them there are. So-called postmodernism is even more sterile than modernism, and, as its name suggests, also totally dependent on it. For two thousand years the arts have been imitative, and it's only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that people started refusing to be mimetic. Why? Because we're more mimetic than ever. Rivalry plays a role such that we strive vainly to exorcise imitation. MT

Set aside time on a regular basis to immerse yourself in books, films, magazines, and other resources that stoke the fire of your curiosity. Keep a list of resources that strike you as interesting, and set aside time to experience them each day. I keep a “Stimulus Queue,” which is a list of all of the interesting books, films, or articles that I come across throughout my day and I want to revisit later, during my study time. I also use a variety of Web-based tools to stockpile articles I come across for later viewing. I then work through them systemically, take notes, and consider how they may apply to my work. Always leave time at the end of any reading/study session to reflect on what you’ve read and to consider how it is relevant to your work. The next great idea for your work will probably not come from watching your competitors, but from taking an insight from an unrelated industry and applying it to your own. Read and experience broadly, and with focus on your deeper questions.

In the past, the states best able to manage events beyond their borders have been those best able to avoid the temptation to overreach. Great powers remain great in large measure because they posses wisdom to temper active involvement in foreign interventions - to remain within the limits of a national strategy that balances ambition with military resources. The first principle of the strategic art states simply that the greatest weight of resources be devoted to safeguarding the most vital interests of the state. If a vital interest is threatened, the survival of the state is threatened. Generally, the most vital interest of a liberal democracy include, first and foremost, preservation of the territorial integrity of the state. The example of the attacks on New York and Washington should send a message to those of similar ambitions that the surest way to focus the wrath of the American people against them would be to strike this country within its borders again. The second strategic priority is the protection of the national economic welfare by ensuring free and open access to markets for vital materials and finished goods. Other important but less vital interests should be defended by the threat of force only as military resources permit. Outside the limits of U.S. territory, the strategic problem defining the geographic limits of U.S. vital interests becomes complex. While the United States may have some interests in every corner of the world, there are certain regions where its strategic interests, both economic and cultural, are concentrated and potentially threatened. These vital strategic "centers of gravity" encompass in the first instance those geographic areas essential to maintaining access to open markets and sources of raw material, principally oil. Fortunately, many of these economically vital centers are secure from serious threat. But a few happen to be located astride regions that have witnessed generations of cultural and ethnic strife. Four regions overshadow all others in being both vital to continued domestic prosperity and continually under the threat of state-supported violence. These regions are defined generally by an arc of territories along the periphery of Eurasia: Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and north East Asia. For the past several centuries, these regions have been the areanas of the world's most serious and intractable conflicts. Points of collision begin with the intersection of Western and Eastern Christianity and continue southward to mark Islam's incursion into southeastern Europe in the Balkans. The cultural divide countries without interruption across the Levant in an unbroken line of unrest and warring states from the crescent of the Middle East to the subcontinent of South Asia. The fault-line concludes with the divide between China and all the traditional cultural competitors along its land and sea borders. Other countries outside the periphery of Eurasia might, in extreme cases, demand the presence of U.S. forces for peacekeeping or humanitarian operations. But it is unlikely that in the years to come the United States will risk a major conflict that will involve the calculated commitment of forces in a shooting war in regions outside this "periphery of Eurasia," which circumscribes and defines America's global security.

Hannibal achieved this great victory not with superior numbers but superior strategy and extraordinary tactical execution. And that’s his lesson to us: When faced with superior competitors, use your knowledge of their habits and weaknesses to outsmart them. How can you invert commonplace thinking and outmaneuver your competitors when they’re falsely feeling confident?

about how quickly they can get a customer off the phone, which in our eyes is not delivering great customer service. Most call centers also have scripts and force their reps to try to upsell customers to generate additional revenue. At Zappos, we don’t measure call times (our longest phone call was almost six hours long!), and we don’t upsell. We just care about whether the rep goes above and beyond for every customer. We don’t have scripts because we trust our employees to use their best judgment when dealing with each and every customer. We want our reps to let their true personalities shine during each phone call so that they can develop a personal emotional connection (internally referred to as PEC) with the customer. Another example of us using the telephone as a branding device is what happens when a customer calls looking for a specific style of shoes in a specific size that we’re out of stock on. In those instances, every rep is trained to research at least three competitors’ Web sites, and if the shoe is found in stock to direct the customer to the competitor.

If anyone has ever sold you anything with a warning to fear the consequences if you don’t buy it, they are using a proverbial gun to your head to help you see the “value” of choosing them over their competitor. Or perhaps it’s just a banana. But it works.

Vertical alignment implies more than employee compliance with strategy that is set at the top. It's a two-way street. Strategy must be determined by customers, but it must also be informed and shaped by the people who implement it. Employees in the middle of the organization and on the front lines almost always experience greater intimacy with customers and competitors than do senior managers, and their insights can enrich strategy-but only if they are actively solicited.

The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

Wal-Mart is so large, its reach so great, that it has created an ecosystem in which its suppliers and competitors, and their suppliers and competitors, and their customers, all operate. Wal-Mart sets the metabolism, it sets the rules, of that ecosystem. Wal-Mart has inexorably changed our expectations as shoppers—and the Wal-Mart effect also extends to consumers who never shop at Wal-Mart. Likewise, Wal-Mart has reshaped the companies that supply it—and it has also reset the pace and the competitive landscape even for companies that try to do business outside the Wal-Mart ecosystem.

1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

Never Put These Ten Words in Your Pitch Deck Take a close look at your standard pitch deck, the “about us” section on your corporate home page, or your PR material. Highlight every instance of the words “leading,” “unique,” “solution,” or “innovative.” In particular, go find all instances of the phrase “We work to understand our customers’ unique needs and then build custom solutions to meet those needs.” Then hit the delete key. Because every time you use one of those buzzwords, you are telling your customers, “We are exactly the same as everyone else.” Ironically, the more we try to play up our differences, the more things sound the same. Public relations expert Adam Sherk recently analyzed the terms used in company communications, and the results are devastating. Here are the top ten: By definition, there can be only one leader in any industry—and 161,000 companies each think they’re it. More than 75,000 companies think they’re the “best” or the “top”; 30,400 think they’re “unique.” “Solution” also makes an appearance at number seven—so if you think that calling your offering a “solution” differentiates you, think again. If everyone’s saying they offer the “leading solution,” what’s the customer to think? We can tell you what their response will be: “Great—give me 10 percent off.” We don’t mean to be unsympathetic here. You’ll find it’s hard to avoid these terms—heck, we call our own consulting arm “SEC Solutions”! In all of our time at the Council, we have never once met a member who doesn’t think her company’s value proposition beats the socks off the competitors’. And it’s understandable. After all, why would we want to work for a company whose product is second-rate—especially when our job is to sell that product? But what the utter sameness of language here tells us is that, ironically, a strategy of more precisely describing our products’ advantages over the competition’s is destined to have the exact opposite effect—we simply end up sounding like everyone else.

What’s in it for me?” Our culture teaches us that if we want something in life, we have to “look out for number one.” It says, “Life is a game, a race, a competition, and you better win it.” Schoolmates, work colleagues, even family members are seen as competitors—the more they win, the less there is for you. Of course we try to appear generous and cheer for others’ successes, but inwardly, privately, so many of us are eating our hearts out when others achieve. Many of the great things in the history of our civilization have been achieved by the independent will of a determined soul.

Early entry is appropriate when the following general circumstances hold:   Image and reputation of the firm are important to the buyer, and the firm can develop an enhanced reputation by being a pioneer. Early entry can initiate the learning process in a business in which the learning curve is important, experience is difficult to imitate, and it will not be nullified by successive technological generations. Customer loyalty will be great, so that benefits will accrue to the firm that sells to the customer first. Absolute cost advantages can be gained by early commitment to supplies of raw materials, distribution channels, and so on.

The Federal Trade Commission, a U.S. regulatory agency, was investigating Microsoft for possible violations of laws aimed at limiting abusive monopolies. This pained Gates, who felt he was simply a victim of his great success. “I don’t think the rich get much credit for anything,” he said. His own experience, he felt, bore this out. Just a few years earlier, he had been celebrated as the scrappy entrepreneur who courageously carved a thriving business from the technological wilderness ignored by entrenched powers. Now he was a maligned bully who wanted to own the entire software universe; a greedy man who thumbed his nose at both customers and competitors. Which

And if you have an area you’re working, talk to customers. Every day. Talk to users of your product, active, inactive, new, and old. Talk to people who don’t want to use your product. Talk to people who are using a competitor’s product. Talk to customers of products in adjacent markets. Now, reread this paragraph and replace talk with listen. Understand how customers see the world. They don’t know the solutions, but they know the problems well. If you haven’t talked to a customer today, you’re doing it wrong. The simple fact is that the majority of great software startups today … required no technical insight to start, and you can always hire experts to help you scale. The driver of these innovations is an uncommon understanding of what the customer (aka humans) wants or how to deliver an understood solution in a better way. —S

I always tell my clients that they can learn a lot by watching and analyzing other companies that are in crisis, especially competitors. (As that great philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot by just watching.”) For one thing, if a company in your industry group suffers a crisis, could you be next? Figure it out and govern yourself accordingly.

The Purpose gives the array of these actions coherence, not just at any given moment, but over time, and thus helps ensure that the firm does achieve a genuine specialization, a genuine difference from its competitors. In this way it makes superior profits possible. Purpose

There’s the potential that Tesla is setting itself up to capitalize on a situation like the one Apple found itself in when it first introduced the iPhone. Apple’s rivals spent the initial year after the iPhone’s release dismissing the product. Once it became clear Apple had a hit, the competitors had to catch up. Even with the device right in their hands, it took companies like HTC and Samsung years to produce anything comparable. Other once-great companies like Nokia and BlackBerry didn’t withstand the shock. If, and it’s a big if, Tesla’s Model 3 turned into a massive hit—the thing that everyone with enough money wanted because buying something else would just be paying for the past—then the rival automakers would be in a terrible bind. Most of the car companies dabbling in electric vehicles continue to buy bulky, off-the-shelf batteries rather than developing their own technology. No matter how much they wanted to respond to the Model 3, the automakers would need years to come up with a real challenger and even then they might not have a ready supply of batteries for their vehicles. “I think it is going to be a bit like that,” Musk said. “When will the first non-Tesla Gigafactory get built? Probably no sooner than six years from now. The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward. They’re probably more like seven years away. But I hope I’m wrong.” Musk

are busy fighting over fractions of a market-share point, someone else who doesn’t care will come in and build a new platform that completely changes the game. Larry again: “Obviously we think about competition to some extent. But I feel my job is mostly getting people not to think about our competition. In general I think there’s a tendency for people to think about the things that exist. Our job is to think of the thing you haven’t thought of yet that you really need. And by definition, if our competitors knew that thing, they wouldn’t tell it to us or anybody else.”86 This isn’t to say you should ignore competition. Competition makes you better. It keeps you sharp. We are all human and subject to complacency, no matter how often we tell ourselves to stay on our toes. Nothing lights a fire like a competitor. When Microsoft launched the Bing search engine in 2009, we were concerned enough to kick off an all-hands-on-deck process to intensify our efforts on search. This planted seeds that led to new features such as Google Instant (search results as you type) and Image Search (drag an image into the search box and Google figures out what it is and uses it as the query). You can draw a line from the launch of Bing to these great new features. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “You must be proud of your enemy; then your enemy’s successes are also your successes.”87 Be proud of your competitors. Just don’t follow them.

You are better than you think you are; you can play at a higher level than you think you can; and you have the potential to beat so-called better players. If you’re a competitor and not just playing for exercise (and “cardio” tennis is great), don’t accept where you are; don’t settle for less. Shake yourself up in whatever manner it takes and you’ll get results. Like Murray and the Djoker you can turn things around and beat players who are beating you.

with clever strategic planning, you can eliminate your competitor’s advantage.

So, execution is really the critical part of a successful strategy. Getting it done, getting it done right, getting it done better than the next person is far more important than dreaming up new visions of the future. All of the great companies in the world out-execute their competitors day in and day out in the marketplace, in their manufacturing plants, in their logistics, in their inventory turns—in just about everything they do. Rarely do great companies have a proprietary position that insulates them from the constant hand-to-hand combat of competition.

Empirical evidence suggests that the relationship between the profitability of larger share and smaller share depends on the industry. Exhibit 7-1 compares the rate of return on equity of the largest firms accounting for at least 30 percent of industry sales (leaders) to the rate of return on equity of the medium-sized firms in the same industry (followers). In this calculation small firms with assets less than $500,000 were excluded. Although some of the industries in the sample are overly broad, it is striking that followers were noticeably more profitable than leaders in 15 of 38 industries. The industries in which the followers’ rates of return were higher appear generally to be those where economies of scale are either not great or absent (clothing, footwear, pottery, meat products, carpets) and/or those that are highly segmented (optical, medical and ophthalmic goods, liquor, periodicals, carpets, and toys and sporting goods). The industries in which leaders’ rates of return are higher seem to be generally those with heavy advertising (soap; perfumes; soft drinks; grain mill products, i.e., cereal; cutlery) and/or research outlays and production economies of scale (radio and television, drugs, photographic equipment). This outcome is as we would expect.

Sources Of Customers, Best To Worst 1st Your existing customers 2nd Referrals from your happy customers 3rd Your company’s existing customers 4th Your competitor’s existing customers. Follow the salesman. (You’re going to love this!) 5th That great customer with an immediate need. Direct mail...cold calling 6th People who buy from your method of selling… in-home, mail, referral. 7th Pretty much the other 94% of the world.

You can't have a Champion Athlete without great competitors pushing them away.

Simple Ways To Harness The Power Of Tiktok For Business Success In 2020, social media has been empowered in the world of digital marketing. TikTok is one of the traditional video-sharing platforms, for all the individual and business accounts use this platform to entertain people. TikTok gives you an amazing way to share your posts with your audience and get more visibility to your website. Make sure you can only post your video through reactions. TikTok allows you to share 15-second videos with a variety of topics. It gives different songs with filters to shoot your video directly from your mobile device. But many also struggle to exactly use TikTok for business purposes. Here are some simple ways to harness the power of TikTok for business success. TikTok On Business TikTok is a great opportunity to start your business, promote your brand, and create a connection with your audience and brand by using engaging videos. It is one of the most popular social media in the world because it connects with a wider audience. Under this updated world, everything is changed into online marketing and purchasing. This is the big advantage to start your business with this social media. TikTok is relative to a younger audience, so you should target teens and promote your brand relevant to their needs and interest to get better positive results. Create Engaging Contents TikTok is only a place to make fun and creativity. TikTok short-form videos easily capture the audience's attention because of the entertaining nature. It gives the big opportunity to create your content that focuses more on the fun and entertaining to connect the wider audience. So, you don’t need to feel the pressure of creating your content. You can simply make your video with an effective background and showing your product. But your main goal is to keep managing your product offers. Get More Influencers There are lots of ways to take advantage of the platform to promote your brand. One easy way to advertise your products on TikTok via influencers. You need to find the right influencer to develop your business. If you grow your TikTok likes, you can improve your brand identity and get more profit. Also, you can analyze which kind of products you offer to get the best and positive results. If you share more videos whether or not they are relevant to your industry, you can change to become a good influencer. But, you need to post your stories frequently. Promote Hashtag Challenges If you add your branded hashtag with your video, you can get more visibility in your audience. A hashtag challenge is one of the effective ways to reach your targeted audience to talk about your business. The main goal of the hashtag challenge is to encourage your audience and create a brand identity. Most of the users love to participate in these challenges. TikTok Growth TikTok is undoubtedly a powerful social media tool with billions of followers sharing their expressions every day. This is a new platform compared to other social media networks, but it contains large competitors. It is worth spending your time developing for the benefit of your business.

Leaders often panic when recessions strike. They go into survival mode, managing quarter-to-quarter and shoring up their numbers by cutting back on the long-term growth projects we’ve described in previous pages. Such actions might please investors in the moment, but they undo hard-won progress the organization has made. This is a big mistake, and one thankfully we avoided. By looking for creative solutions to the financial challenges we faced during the Great Recession, we maintained our investments while still delivering results that outdid our competitors’ performance.

There are many reasons projects can die: funding dwindles, a competitor wins, the market changes, a key person leaves. But the False Fail is common to loonshots. Risks of this type of death can never be fully eliminated—negative results don’t come with a neon sign that lights up “your idea is flawed” or “your test is flawed.” But those risks can be reduced, which is exactly what Endo and Folkman did, as we will discuss below. People may think of Endo and Folkman as great inventors, but arguably their greatest skill was investigating failure. They learned to separate False Fails from true fails.

We lack space here to discuss in detail the pros and cons of market forecasting. A great deal of brain power goes into this field, and undoubtedly some people can make money by being good stock-market analysts. But it is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts. For who will buy when the general public, at a given signal, rushes to sell out at a profit? If you, the reader, expect to get rich over the years by following some system or leadership in market forecasting, you must be expecting to try to do what countless others are aiming at, and to be able to do it better than your numerous competitors in the market. There is no basis either in logic or in experience for assuming that any typical or average investor can anticipate market movements more successfully than the general public, of which he is himself a part. There is one aspect of the “timing” philosophy which seems to have escaped everyone’s notice. Timing is of great psychological importance to the speculator because he wants to make his profit in a hurry. The idea of waiting a year before his stock moves up is repugnant to him. But a waiting period, as such, is of no consequence to the investor. What advantage is there to him in having his money uninvested until he receives some (presumably) trustworthy signal that the time has come to buy? He enjoys an advantage only if by waiting he succeeds in buying later at a sufficiently lower price to offset his loss of dividend income. What this means is that timing is of no real value to the investor unless it coincides with pricing—that is, unless it enables him to repurchase his shares at substantially under his previous selling price.

An Internet company decides to revolutionize an industry—personal transportation, the taxi and limousine market—that defines old-school business-government cooperation, with all the attendant bureaucracy and incompetence and unsatisfying service. It sells itself to investors with the promise that it can buy its way to market dominance in this sclerotic field and use its cutting-edge tech to slash through red tape and find unglimpsed efficiencies. On the basis of that promise, it raises billions upon billions of dollars across its ten-year rise, during which time it becomes as big as promised in Western markets, a byword for Internet-era success, cited by boosters and competitors alike as the model for how to disrupt an industry, how to “move fast and break things” as the Silicon Valley mantra has it. By the time it goes public in 2019, it has $11 billion in annual revenue—real money, exchanged for real services, nothing fraudulent about it. Yet this amazing success story isn’t actually making any sort of profit, even at such scale; instead, it’s losing billions upon billions of dollars, including $5 billion in one particuarly costly quarter. After ten years of growth, it has smashed the old business model of its industry, weakened legacy competitors, created a great deal of value for consumers—but it has done all this without any discipline from market forces, using the awesome power of free money to build a company that would collapse into bankruptcy if that money were withdrawn. And in that time, it has solved exactly none of the problems that would have prevented a company that needed to make a profit from building such a large user base: it has no obvious competitive advantages besides the huge investor subsidy; the technology it uses is hardly proprietary or complex; its rival in disruption controls 30 percent of the market, even as the legacy players are still very much alive; and

With trust, a business can inspire a movement and destroy its competitors. The more honesty, the more trust. The more trust, the more profits.

The gold standard was intended to create an integrated global marketplace that reduced the role of national units and national governments, but its consequences were exactly the opposite.23 Polanyi shows that when it was widely adopted in the 1870s, it had the ironic effect of intensifying the importance of the nation as a unified entity. Although market liberals dreamed of a pacified world in which the only international struggles would be those of individuals and firms to outperform their competitors, their efforts to realize these dreams through the gold standard produced two horrific world wars.

Another thing you need to understand is what we now call the “core competencies” of your organization. What are we really good at? What do our customers pay us for? Why do they buy from us? In a competitive, nonmonopolistic market—and that is what the world has become—there is absolutely no reason why a customer should buy from you rather from your competitor. None. He pays you because you give him something that is of value to him. What is it that we get paid for? You may think this is a simple question. It is not. I have been working with some of the world’s biggest manufacturers, producers, and distributors of packaged consumer goods. All of you use their products, even in Slovenia. They have two kinds of customers. One, of course, is the retailer. The other is the housewife. What do they pay for? I have been asking this question for a year now. I do not know how many companies in the world make soap, but there are a great many. And I can’t tell the difference between one kind of soap or the other. And why does the buyer have a preference—and a strong one, by the way? What does it do for her? Why is she willing to buy from one manufacturer when on the same shelves in the United States or in Japan or in Germany they are soaps from other companies? She usually does not even look at them. She reaches out for that one soap. Why? What does she see? What does she want? Try to work on this. Incidentally, the best way to find out is to ask customers not by questionnaire but by sitting down with them and finding out. The most successful retailer I know in the world is not one of the big retail chains. It is somebody in Ireland, a small country about the size of Slovenia. This particular company is next door to Great Britain with its very powerful supermarkets, and all of them are also in Ireland. And yet this little company has maybe 60 percent of the sandwich market. What do they do? Well, the answer is that the boss spends two days each week in one of his stores serving customers, from the meat counter to the checkout counter, and is the one who puts stuff into bags and carries it out to the shoppers’ automobiles. He knows what the customers pay for. But let me go back to the beginning: The place to start managing is not in the plant, and it is not in the office. You start with managing yourself by finding out your own strengths, by placing yourself where your strengths can produce results and making sure that you set the right example (which is basically what ethics is all about), and by placing your people where their strengths can produce results.

For a king among people is one whom no-one rules but God the most high, and who does not need anything except God-great and glorious. And with that he rules his kingdom insofar as his soldiers and his subjects obey him. Yet the kingdom proper to him is his own heart and soul, where his soldiers are his appetites, his anger, and his affections; while his subjects are his tongue, his eyes, his hands, and the rest of his organs. If he rules them and they do not rule him, and if they obey him and he does not obey them, he will attain the level of a king in this world. And if that be coupled with the fact that he is independent of all people, yet all people are in need of him for their life now and in the future, he will be an earthly king. This is the level of the prophets-may God's blessings be upon all of them. For they have no need of direction to the next life from anyone except God-great and glorious-while everyone needs it from them. They are followed in this kingship by religious scholars, who 'inherit the legacy of the prophets', Their kingship, however, is proportional to their ability to guide the people, and to their lack of need for asking for guidance. By means of these attributes man comes close to the angels in qualities, and by means of them approaches God the most high. This kingship is a gift to man from the true king whose sovereignty has no competitor.

How a company is perceived, Bezos concluded, largely came down to how it behaved, and how its behaviors compared with those of its direct competitors. “Rudeness is not cool,” he warned his colleagues. “Defeating tiny guys is not cool,” he added. “Polite is cool,” he argued, “defeating bigger, unsympathetic guys is cool.

The value of good design is the increased possibility of success. We understand its importance in everyday objects like chairs, clothes, watches, coffee makers, and a good mattress. When it comes to websites, we tend to think of design as a surface layer applied at the end. In truth, that website’s design started long ago. It can be intentional or happenstance. For design to be truly great, you need to build it into your projects from conception. Because if you’re not doing it, you can bet your competitors are.

We don’t do superstars in our Tough Mudder world—but if we were to, it would be hard to ignore the claims of Amelia Boone, an athlete who now features regularly on the cover of Runner’s World and who has been the women’s champion at World’s Toughest three times. An in-house lawyer for Apple in Silicon Valley, Amelia is among the only competitors to keep running for twenty-four hours in the desert without a rest. She keeps coming back not for the glory of “winning” but because, she says, “you will never find a race like World’s Toughest Mudder—where you are technically running against other people but where you will still see the leader out there stopping to help people up over walls or out of the water. It is just this unwritten rule; no one questions it, that is how it is.” Amelia studied social anthropology before she became a lawyer, with an interest in the way that social norms and gossip were used by indigenous tribes to create and maintain healthy and coherent cultures. Tough Mudder, she suggests, is the closest she has come to seeing that tribal spirit in action in the contemporary world. “If I am out for a run and I see someone wearing a Tough Mudder headband or T-Shirt, there is always a big smile and a nod of recognition between us,” she says, as if she is speaking of a pair of Yanomami natives coming across each other on a forest trail. It’s a nod, she suggests, that communicates a great many things—not only shared philosophies and kinship but also the recognition that “I may well have pushed your wet ass over a wall at some point last year.

Before you were born, And were still too tiny for The human eye to see, You won the race for life From among 250 million competitors. And yet, How fast you have forgotten Your strength, When your very existence Is proof of your greatness. You were born a winner, A warrior, One who defied the odds By surviving the most gruesome Battle of them all. And now that you are a giant, Why do you even doubt victory Against smaller numbers, And wider margins? The only walls that exist, Are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, Exist only because you have forgotten What you have already Achieved.

Being a Mosel vintner signifies membership in a human culture much deeper than occupation. This is true of every vintner great, good, or poor. This may seem abstruse to the 'consumer' but there are many ways to consume and many things to be consumed in a glass of wine. You can see it merely as an object and assess it against it's competitors using some arbitrary scale. Or you can drink something that tells you it was made by human beings who want to show you the beauty and meaning they have found in their lives. You decide.

REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS Before you were born, And were still too tiny for The human eye to see, You won the race for life From among 250 million competitors. And yet, How fast you have forgotten Your strength, When your very existence Is proof of your greatness. You were born a winner, A warrior, One who defied the odds By surviving the most gruesome Battle of them all. And now that you are a giant, Why do you even doubt victory Against smaller numbers, And wider margins? The only walls that exist, Are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, Exist only because you have forgotten What you have already Achieved. REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS by Suzy Kassem

For Microsoft’s productivity applications, the break came when the world transitioned from text-based DOS applications to graphical user interfaces, in the mid-1980s. But as the industry shifted from text to graphical interfaces, it created an opening, as every application needed to be rewritten to support the new paradigm of dropdown menus, icons, toolbars, and the mouse. While Microsoft redesigned and rethought their applications, their competitors were too stuck in the old world, and so Word and Excel leapfrogged their competitors. Then in an ensuing stroke of product marketing genius, it was combined into the Microsoft Office suite, which promptly became a colossus. Much effort was put toward making each application within the suite work with each other. For example, an Excel chart would be embedded within a Microsoft Word document—this was called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)—which made the combination of the products more powerful. In other words, the product really matters, and bundling can provide a huge distribution advantage, but it can only go so far. It’s an echo of what we now see in the internet age, where Twitter might drive users to its now-defunct livestreaming platform Periscope, or Google might push everyone to use Google Meet. It can work, but only when the product is great. This is part of why the concept of bundling as been around forever—the McDonald’s Happy Meal was launched in the 1970s, and cable companies have been bundling TV channels since their start. But at the heart of these bundling stories are important, iconic products that reinvent the market.

As more and more people know what model you’re using to manipulate them, they may decide not to respond to your incentives. As your competitors gain knowledge of the model, they respond in kind by adopting the model themselves, thus flattening the field. The model may have been mostly useful in a factory setting, and not in an office setting, or a technology setting. Human beings are not simple automatons: A more complete model would hone in on other motivations they

When you choose to see everyone around you as a competitor. Everything as a competition. It will be difficult for you to ask for help or to get help when you need it. It will be difficult to get where you want to be In life, because no man is an Island. We always need each other, to archive great things. We must choose to set our differences aside and learn on how to work together.

What are other people building? Who are the company’s main competitors? How are their target use cases, personas, and end customers different? How are their products different? How are they winning or losing compared to another company? Are you aware of who’s out there?

The 5C structure is generic—useful to product, marketing, and more—whereas the way we presented the sections in this chapter is very focused on product management. It’s good to know what the “C”s stand for because you’ll likely hear 5C mentioned. Plus if you need to do a situational analysis on your feet in a meeting or interview, it’s relatively easy to remember. Company: This refers to the company’s experience, technology, culture, goals, and more. It’s similar to the material we covered in the “Why Does the Company Exist?,” “How Do We Know If Our Product’s Good?,” and “What Else Has Been, Is Being, and Will Be Built?” sections. Customers: Who are the people buying this product? What are the market segments? How big are they? What are people’s goals with buying this product? How do they make buying decisions? Where do they buy this type or product? This is similar to what we covered in the “Customers and Personas” and “Use Cases” sections. Collaborators: Who are the external people who make the product possible, including distributors, suppliers, logistical operators, groundwork support personnel, and so on? Competitors: Who is competing for your customers’ money? This includes actual and potential competitors. You should look at how they position their product, the market size they address, their strengths and weaknesses, and more. Climate: These are the macro-environmental factors, like cultural, regulatory, or technological trends and innovations.

So what was the Bell System waiting for? Kelly acknowledged that the phone company would capitalize on the transistor long after “other fields of application” such as the home entertainment industries.4 The recent Justice Department antitrust suit, which was now moving forward, was a stark reminder why: The phone company was a regulated monopoly and not a private company; it had no competitors pushing it to move forward faster. What’s more, it was obliged to balance costs against service quality in the most cautious way possible. “Everything that we design must go through the judgment of lots of people as to its ability to replace the old,” Kelly told an audience of phone executives in October 1951.

If you think a competitor sucks, say so. When you do that, you’ll find that others who agree with you will rally to your side. Being the anti-______ is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts positioned itself as the anti-Starbucks. Its ads once mocked Starbucks for using “Fritalian” terms instead of small, medium, and large. Another Dunkin’ campaign was centered on a taste test in which it beat Starbucks. There was even a site called DunkinBeatStarbucks.com where visitors could send e-cards with statements like “Friends don’t let friends drink Starbucks.

The most successful organizations don’t obsess about their competitors. They build great products or deliver great services that solve specific problems at a price their customers believe is fair.

Just as damaging as the extortionate prices was the restricted access. Despite Daraprim being an essential medicine, Turing sold it through only one pharmacy, Walgreens, and only then in its ‘specialty’ rather than regular stores. This stopped competitors getting their hands on it to develop cheaper alternatives.

Joan Joyce is the real deal, a fierce competitor and one of the greatest athletes and coaches in sports history. Tony Renzoni’s moving tribute to Joan shows us why she is a champion in sports and in life. —Billie Jean King, sports icon and equality pioneer The story is all true. Joan Joyce was a tremendous pitcher, as talented as anyone who ever played. [responding to a newspaper account of his early 1960s match-ups against Joan Joyce] —Ted Williams, Hall of Famer and Boston Red Sox great, December 30, 1999 Joan Joyce is truly the greatest female athlete in sports history. And a great coach as well. Tony Renzoni’s well-researched book is a touching tribute to this phenomenal athlete. I highly recommend this book! —Bobby Valentine, former MLB player and manager Quotes for Historic Connecticut Music Venues: From the Coliseum to the Shaboo: I would like to thank Tony Renzoni for giving me the opportunity to write the foreword to his wonderful book. I highly recommend Connecticut Music Venues: From the Coliseum to Shaboo to music lovers everywhere! —Felix Cavaliere, Legendary Hall of Famer (Young Rascals/Rascals, Solo) As the promoter of the concerts in many of the music venues in this book, I hope you enjoy living the special memories this book will give you. —Jim Koplik, Live Nation president, Connecticut and Upstate New York Tony Renzoni has captured the soul and spirit of decades of the Connecticut live music scene, from the wild and wooly perspective of the music venues that housed it. A great read! —Christine Ohlman, the “Beehive Queen,” recording artist/songwriter Tony Renzoni has written a very thoughtful and well-researched tribute to the artists of Connecticut, and we are proud to have Gene included among them. —Lynne Pitney, wife of Gene Pitney Our Alice Cooper band recorded the Billion Dollars Babies album in a mansion in Greenwich. Over the years, there have been many great musicians from Connecticut, and the local scene is rich with good music. Tony Renzoni’s book captures all of that and more. Sit back and enjoy the ride. —Dennis Dunaway, hall of famer and co-founder of the Alice Cooper band. Rock ’n’ Roll music fans from coast to coast will connect to events in this book. Strongly recommended! —Judith Fisher Freed, estate of Alan Freed

The AR-57, also known as the AR Five Seven, is available as either an upper receiver for the AR-15/M16 rifle or a complete rifle, firing 5.7×28mm rounds from standard FN P90 magazines. It was designed by AR57 LLC and[3] was produced by AR57 of Kent, Washington, United States. The AR-57 PDW upper is a new design on AR-15/M16 rifles, blending the AR-15/M16 lower with a lightweight, monolithic upper receiver system chambered in FN 5.7×28mm. This model is also sold as a complete rifle, supplied with two 50-round P90 magazines.[1] The magazines mount horizontally on top of the front handguard, with brass ejecting through the magazine well. Hollow AR-15 magazines can be used to catch spent casings. Unlike the standard AR-15 configuration which uses a gas-tube system , the AR-57 cycles via straight blowback.[6] A fully automatic version exists and was marketed as a competitor to the P90 and other personal defense weapons.[7] Manufactured by the eponymous AR57 LLC, and chambered in 5.7x28mm, this upper is less powerful than the standard 5.56mm version, but it has certain tangible advantages, including reduced muzzle blast, a high practical rate of fire, nonexistent recoil, and the ability to use folding stocks. Since the buffer is located within the receiver, folding stocks may also be used for compact storage or carry. To load, place the base plate of a standard FN P90 magazine into the recess on the front of the upper, then press the feed lip side down on the catch located above and slightly back of the bolt. To charge, pull on the right-side nonreciprocating handle and release. The right-side charging hand placement makes it accessible for operation by the strong hand. Since it only has to be operated once every 50 shots, the time penalty for moving the hand off the pistol grip isn’t too great. Empties will eject downward through the nominal magazine well. Some people use a 20-round magazine body with the feed lips, spring and follower removed to act as a brass catcher. The magazine has no provision for activating the bolt lock when empty, but the bolt can be locked open using the catch on the lower. The upper runs very cleanly and reliably, requiring no maintenance after the first 500 shots. The AR57 comes with a medium fluted barrel, reasonable for a varmint rifle but excessive for a defensive carbine. Burning around six grains per shot, 5.7x28mm runs much cooler than 5.56mm, which burns four or more times as much. That yields much reduced muzzle blast and far greater heat endurance, of course at the cost of a roughly 40 percent slower bullet.

On the other hand, when a company’s value curve lacks focus, its cost structure will tend to be high and its business model complex in implementation and execution. When it lacks divergence, a company’s strategy is a me-too, with no reason to stand apart in the marketplace. When it lacks a compelling tagline that speaks to buyers, it is likely to be internally driven or a classic example of innovation for innovation’s sake with no great commercial potential and no natural take-off capability. A Company Caught in the Red Ocean When a company’s value curve converges with its competitors, it signals that a company is likely caught within the red ocean of bloody competition. A company’s explicit or implicit strategy tends to be trying to outdo its competition on the basis of cost or quality. This signals slow growth unless, by the grace of luck, the company benefits from being in an industry that is growing on its own accord. This growth is not due to a company’s strategy, however, but to luck. Overdelivery without Payback When a company’s value curve on the strategy canvas is shown to deliver high levels across all factors, the question is, Does the company’s market share and profitability reflect these investments? If not, the strategy canvas signals that the company may be oversupplying its customers, offering too much of those elements that add incremental value to buyers. To value-innovate, the company must decide which factors to eliminate and reduce—and not only those to raise and create—to construct a divergent value curve. Strategic Contradictions Are there strategic contradictions? These are areas where a company is offering a high level on one competing factor while ignoring others that support that factor. An example is investing heavily in making a company’s website easy to use but failing to correct the site’s slow speed of operation. Strategic inconsistencies can also be found between the level of your offering and your price. For example, a petroleum station company found that it offered “less for more”: fewer services than the best competitor at a higher price. No wonder it was losing market share fast.

Policies and control processes became so foundational to our work that those who were great at coloring within the lines were promoted, while many creative mavericks felt stifled and went to work elsewhere. I was sorry to see them go, but I believed that this was what happens when a company grows up. Then two things occurred. The first is that we failed to innovate quickly. We had become increasingly efficient and decreasingly creative. In order to grow we had to purchase other companies that did have innovative products. That led to more business complexity, which in turn led to more rules and process. The second is that the market shifted from C++ to Java. To survive, we needed to change. But we had selected and conditioned our employees to follow process, not to think freshly or shift fast. We were unable to adapt and, in 1997, ended up selling the company to our largest competitor.